Time cycle

The timecyc.dat data file contains the most important settings about the game's appearance. Basicly it stores important information like colors and lightning for different hardcoded weather situations for almost each time of day. The settings themselfes are constant and build a cycle around the whole day. So the exact name of the setting is time cycle.

In the Vice City the timecyc.dat file additionally stores settings for different interior appearances. There are 24 of those extra settings in one extra section (internally called "EXTRACOLOURS"). Each game hour represents one constant setting.

File format

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A comment in the timecyc.dat file is preceded by a series of slashes ("//"). The game's parser simply ignores comments so that the number of uncommented lines must be a multiple of 24 for GTA III and Vice City (representing one for each ingame hour) and a multiple of 8 for San Andreas (representing 00am, 05am, 06am, 07am, 00pm, 07pm, 08pm and 10pm in the order they appear). Each value of one entry gets interpolated with the previous and the next setting of the current ingame weather.

Data types

The file uses the following different data types directly or indirectly on an abstract level inside structures:

• INT8/UINT8 - signed/unsigned 8 bit integer (1 byte)
• INT32/UINT32 - signed/unsigned 32 bit integer (4 byte)
• FLOAT - single precision floating point number (4 byte)
• TColor - UINT8[3] (3 byte)

File hierarchy

As mentioned above each setting consists out of a constant number of entries seperated by whitespaces. The following table lists the entries and their descriptions in the order they appear:

			Name	Data type	Description
X			Static ambience color	TColor	The color of ambient light on map objects (see IPL).
X			Dynamic ambience color	TColor	The color of ambient light on dynamicly created objects like pedestriants and vehicles.
X		–	Static ambience blur color	TColor	Blurrig color value for static ambience color.
X		–	Dynamic ambience blur color	TColor	Blurrig color value for dynamic ambience color.
X			Direct light color	TColor	The color of direct light on dynamicly created objects like pedestriants and vehicles.
X			Sky top color	TColor	The color of the top of the skysphere.
X			Sky bottom color	TColor	The color of the bottom of the skysphere.
X			Sun core color	TColor	The color of the core sprite of the sun.
X			Sun corona color	TColor	The color of the corona sprite of the sun.
X			Sun core size	FlOAT	The size of the core sprite of the sun.
X			Sun corona size	FLOAT	The size of the corona sprite of the sun.
X			Sprite brightness	FLOAT	The the brightness of the above mentioned sprites.
X			Shadow intensity	INT32	The intensity of the shadows of objects like pedestriants, vehicles or poles.
X			Light shading value	INT32	Value used shading algorithm on pedestirants and vehicles (?).
X			Pole shading value	INT32	Shading value for map objects with flag 32768.
X			Far clipping offset	FLOAT	The distance of the far clipping plane from the camera.
X			Fog start offset	FLOAT	The range of the distance fog from the camera.
X			Light on ground	FLOAT	Amount of light on the ground of the sea (?).
X			Lower clouds color	TColor	Color of the lower clounds.
X		–	Upper clouds top color	TColor	Color of the top of the upper clouds.
X			Upper clouds bottom color	TColor	Color of the bottom of the upper clouds.
X		–	Blur color	TColor	The color of trails.
X			Water color	TColor	Color of the water vertices.
X			Water alpha level	UINT8	Alpha level for water vertices.
–		X	Color correction 1 alpha	UINT8	Alpha level for first color correction value.
–		X	Color correction 1	TColor	First color correction value.
–		X	Color correction 2 alpha	UINT8	Alpha level for second color correction value.
–		X	Color correction 2	TColor	Second color correction value.
–		X	Lower clouds alpha level	UINT8	Alpha level for lower clouds.
–		X	Upper clouds alpha level	UINT8	Alpha level for upper clouds.
–		X	Unused clouds alpha level	UINT8	Usually 0.

Tools

• VC:Weather
• G-CYC

External links

•  GTAForums: Modding timecyc.dat for Vice City